Hi, there!
Looks like netlify fell down in the unequal war between Russian RKN and telegram, looks like no one my site, which deployed on netlify, could not be open without VPN. Could somebody help me to figure out what going on?

I am sorry to hear that you are having issues with our CDN in Russia! It’s not your fault and we are working hard to get the situation resolved.

Here is what we can tell you:

We are currently working with the Russian authorities in order to resolve this roadblock, and have contacted them several times over the last few months.

We have been using our corporate “network” of contacts in other companies, and when speaking to others, it seems like that they are taking an unusually long time to respond to our requests, even though we have made them through the correct channels. We will keep you updated as soon as we have information that seems reliable as to how and when this situation is going to be resolved.

We’ve begun exploring working with a Russia-local agency to see if they can help us “from the inside”. They advise that these blocks seem likely to be accidental, and are somehow leftover from the “Great Telegram Blockage of 2018”, though we moved nodes to new addresses and found that they too were blocked shortly afterwards, so there must be more to the story. We do use network providers that were affected by the block.

Finally we are considering trying to set up a CDN Point of Presence within Russia. We’ve received one referral to a hosting company but we’d be interested in introductions to other ones as we have some unique needs and will be shopping around - if you know of any to recommend, please share contact info here or via DM!

In the meantime, if you or anyone else, has experiences that seem relevant to this issue, or can think of a way to help, we would love to talk to you about it - reply here or email us at the support helpdesk.

Yep, it’s really hardcore to manage any questions with the Russian government. Setup CDN point in Russia, in my opinion, could be a very cool, also in Belarus, we have a low about all business web sites should be hosted physically inside a country, will be great have a CDN point here. Same time, this Belarusian point could be some kind of backup for Russia. How I know only one company can provide it here www.active.by. I will ask them about how it works and etc. and will back to you.

Experienced, I found a solution for full access from Russia to sites running on Netlify. I will describe the solution below.
I found out that the Russian providers are blocking the DigitalOcean IP addresses located in Amsterdam. Namely, it leads to the address Netlify CDN, as one of the closest from Russia.
But it can be changed!

My current solution to the problem of blocking Netlify in Russia.

In dns cases, the ALIAS type entry is for 142.93.108.123 (this is a different Netlify CDN address, but without blocking)

write to support Netlify (many thanks to them) with a request to delete dns records of the NETLIFY type.

I don’t think any workaround like that will be stable. We are working on a real solution around creating a CDN node within Russia that some of our advisors think will enable us to actually work with the Roskomnadzor productively around not being blocked (and as a bonus improve our CDN performance for Russian visitors). We’ll update this thread when we have something in place.

Chiming in, as I also recently learned that my site was inaccessible from Russia (except using a VPN to bypass the IP blocks).

As a workaround, I registered an equivalent .com.ru domain, pointed it to Cloudflare name servers, and added ALIAS (@) and CNAME (www) records to proxy the site hosted at ___.netlify.com. My readers confirmed that they’re able to access the site at this new address.

Although I’m not proxying HTTP and DNS through Cloudflare on my primary domain, I think a similar approach could be viable for anyone who’s worried about access within Russia. For most sites, this should fall within Cloudflare’s free usage tier.